This is the sad story of a plant that was not what I thought it was, and the real truth behind any nice garden: sometimes the gardener has to edit brutally.
A couple of weeks ago, I met a new friend for coffee to talk about some local environmental issues. We walked back into the neighborhood together, and stopped at my rain garden. I had planted a little sprout back in May, thinking it was summersweet.
Its exuberance, especially considering how dry this year has been, had me thinking I would have to move it before it overran everything. It spread fast horizontally—so fast that when my friend looked at me quizzically and said, “That looks a lot like a honeysuckle,” I decided I better investigate. Japanese honeysuckle is a seriously invasive plant that wipes out plants in its path by overrunning them. I knew that plant wasn’t our native honeysuckle, so I pulled out my ancient Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs and looked up Japanese honeysuckle. Hairy opposite leaves with smooth edges, and very hairy twigs. This plant did not seem hairy to me, so I took some pictures.
It is hairy! The New York Botanical Garden has a very useful guide to invasive plants called Mistaken Identity? Invasive Plants and Their Native Look-Alikes: an Identification Guide for the Mid-Atlantic that helps sort this out.
Another really strong indicator is the leaf habits at the ends of the branches. I am pretty sure this is Japanese honeysuckle.
I very carefully moved the lady fern that it was next to and dug the suspected honeysuckle up. It is at least six or seven feet wide. I just pulled it out of the compost bin to photograph it—I thought I had photographed it when I first dug it up, but I had not. As you can see, a week and a half out of the ground and in the covered compost bin—an empty city bin that rolls out to the curb, not a lovely backyard compost pile—has not dampened its enthusiasm in the least.
When it was first planted, it was a small, unassuming shrub, no wider than the blue-eyed grass to the left of the tree root, or the penstemon to the right of the second tree root in the photograph below.
By August, this cute little shrub had leapt over and under the roots, and the front branches were halfway to the sidewalk. I was beginning to eye it nervously. Even if that shrub had turned out to be something benign, it had completely overwhelmed its space and had to go elsewhere. The fact that it is honeysuckle, an invasive plant that ruins the areas it overruns, made “elsewhere” the city’s compost program. Their piles are hot, and will kill the plant.